Jackie

Magnanimity was called the "crowning virtue" by Aristotle.  It is little regarded today and, in fact, the word has been limited in modern usage to refer to eschewing revenge when one has prevailed in some competitive or adversarial endeavor.  The victor shaking hands with the loser in an athletic competition is said to exhibit magnanimity.  This is an example of a vitally important ancient virtue that has been trivialized in the modern, post-Enlightenment era.  For Aristotle and the ancients, magnanimity meant a greatness of soul, a largeness of spirit that would not condone anything petty or cowardly.  Magnanimity was demonstrated by spectacle, by demonstrating greatness of spirit with pomp and circumstance.  Everything about the great-spirited man was bigger than life, more dignified, reserved, and generous. 

Pablo Larrain's biopic Jackie (2016), in large part, is an essay on the topic of  this forgotten virtue, magnanimity.  The film's subject is Jacqueline Kennedy's indomitable response to the assassination of her husband.  Larrain is a Chilean film-maker and he has a baroque Catholic sensibility -- he understands the importance of personal dignity and ritual in the face of calamity.  His film is essentially non-narrative, a study in ambience and character as expressed in small, subtle gestures.  The picture unites several strands of action or discourse:  we see Jackie counseled by a wise family priest (played with great, impenetrable gravitas by John Hurt); she chain-smokes while interviewed by a friendly, if cynical, journalist at Hyannis Port, all the while asserting "I don't smoke."  We see her telling her children that their father will not be coming back to her and planning for JFK's funeral.  Infighting between Lyndon Johnson's lieutenants, most notably the smarmy Jack Valenti, and members of the Kennedy clan comprise one element of the collage that Larrain cuts together and the film's story or plotline, if something so slight can be characterized as narrative, is whether Jackie will insist upon walking on foot with her husband's cortege the eight blocks from the White House to St. Matthew's Cathedral.  LBJ's people oppose this, primarily, it seems, because it will be too spectacular, obsequies that will politically overshadow their regime, although they cloak their concerns in unctuous language about security.  At first, Jackie refuses to reconsider, then, at an emotional low point, agrees to travel the distance by car; however, when LBJ's aides press her on the point and, when Bobbie Kennedy expresses concerns about what JFK's presidency really accomplished, the die is cast -- Jackie will not be disrespected and she changes her mind, insisting upon making the march exposed to crowds atop buildings and lining the streets.  Her objective is to render her husband's presidency mythical, to impart to his funeral legendary spectacle -- she derives the plan for the funeral from the last rites for Abraham Lincoln, overrules Kennedy family demands that the body be interred in the family plot and insists upon burial in Arlington Cemetery, personally selecting the location.  Although couching these decisions in terms of the res publica, she admits that her husband's burial is compensatory for the insults and indignities that she has suffered, including, it is implied, insults arising from Jack Kennedy's compulsive womanizing.  Someone accuses her of devising the funeral as a spectacle about herself, as evidence of her vanity, and she ultimately concedes the point.  But vanity is the sin most closely allied with magnanimity -- pride is magnanimity's dark side -- and the audience is guided to understand that Jackie's insistence on spectacular funeral rites for her fallen husband is based on her greatness of spirit, her immense imperial dignity.  These points are subtle and the film must be watched very carefully.  The First Lady is shown as suffering from various insults -- in one sequence to which the movie obsessively reverts, she leads a tour of the White House:  this is before her husband's slaughter and, as background, relates to charges that she has been wasteful in redecorating the "People's House."  LBJ and his minions are over-anxious to seize power and, essentially, shove the grieving widow and her young children to the side.  She is forced to vacate the White House on a few days notice and, as a student of history, recalls how Mary Todd Lincoln had to sell household furnishings to make ends meet after she was expelled from the White House.  Finally, she has been physically humiliated -- photographed with her coat and hat and clothing all smeared with gore.  (We see her showering with blood sluicing out of her hair down her naked back.)  In the instant after the shooting, the public saw her scrambling back away from the dying president, seeming to crawl over the limousine away from the scene of carnage.  Although this theme is gruesome and, therefore, treated very elliptically by Larrain, a filmmaker of the most exquisite tact, Jackie feels misunderstood with respect to this act -- at the climax of the movie, she recalls the shooting while standing graveside and a flashback shows us indelibly what she was really trying to accomplish when she scrambled back and away from where her husband was dying.  When Robert Kennedy questions the value of the entire presidency, suggesting that JFK didn't accomplish much of anything, and wondering out loud if administration was merely a group of "beautiful people," Jackie is driven to design a funeral that will forever embalm the president's memory in the hearts of the American people.  In this regard, her resolve is ferocious.  She is willing to subject her small children and herself to the risk of sniper fire from rooftops to make the march on foot and, when someone suggests that general DeGaulle is concerned about his personal safety, she savagely snaps that he can "attend the funeral in a tank for all I care." 

Larrain's movie has an unusual subject and one that modern people don't really have words to cogently discuss.  The film is properly somber; Jackie is typically filmed head-on in middle distance, directly facing the camera.  Most of the compositions are highly symmetrical -- the film seems conceived as a series of immobile images, things that don't move, people standing in solemn, tightly-knit, and motionless groups.  The soundtrack consists of a single noble chord that is suddenly contorted and bent downward.  (Larrain also repeatedly cuts back to the famous concert by the cellist Pablo Casals that took place before the President and First Lady as well as assembled dignitaries.)  The film's thesis is that Jackie invented the concept of Camelot or, at least, exploited the idea and that her husband's funeral was an example of intentional myth-making.  As a result, there is a little too much Lerner and Loewe on the soundtrack and I didn't admire the film's ending, a ball in which Jackie and JFK waltz among similarly beautiful people while Richard Burton croaks the theme from the musical.  (I didn't admire the ending, but acknowledge it as generally thematically correct -- the problem here is that Larrain seems to be buying into Jackie's mythmaking, accepting her work of public relations as being, in fact, a representation of the Truth.  In the end, the legend takes over.  I would have much preferred the penultimate scene in which Jackie presides over the burial of her two dead infants next to her husband in Arlington cemetery:  it is cheerless, brutal-looking day and Jackie watches as two small white caskets are lowered into the crypt (one contains a late-stage miscarriage and the other Patrick, a baby who died 39 hours).  This gesture shows conclusively that what Jackie has accomplished is, indeed, about herself, about her family, and her progeny, and, as the scene progresses, the camera shows us her face in close-up -- she is feral with a sort of unapproachable grief.  The film should have ended with that image.) 

Larrain was invited to Hollywood on the strength of an earlier film about public relations, No, a film about the 1988 plebiscite that removed General Pinochet from power in Chile.  With this movie, he has shown us just about everything worth knowing about the dismal subject of public relations.  Jackie is successful on all levels, a very profound and subtle picture that very few people will have the resources to fully admire.  It is clearly one of the best pictures of 2016.